Market intelligence briefing
A public-data view
of McCullough in Austin.
McCullough is a strong #3 in Austin — holding ground as the permit market softens, while losing specific zips to a specific competitor and seeing the rating slip at the edges. This briefing uses public permit data and 3,162 Google reviews to show where.
Prepared for Al D'Andrea III · April 2026 · Public Data Intelligence
Market rank
#3
Of 491 contractors
2025 permits
0
Behind Stan's (722), Radiant (496)
3-year decline
-10.5%
497 → 490 → 449
Q1 2026
#2
Passed Radiant — 95 vs 89
Part one
The competitive landscape
Every residential HVAC replacement in Austin requires a mechanical permit. The city publishes every one. Each column is a zip code, color-coded by contractor. Height is 2025 permit volume. Pan, pitch, and zoom the map of Austin to explore.
Austin HVAC territory — 2025 permits by zip
Drag to pan · Right-click to orbit · Scroll to zoom
McCullough
Radiant
Stan's
South Austin tells the story. Look at 78745 — Radiant's coral bar towers over McCullough's blue. That zip flipped from McCullough-led to Radiant-led in one year. In 78748, McCullough dropped to #3. Two of five strongholds are no longer led by McCullough.
Q1 2026 pace
All three are off their 2025 peaks, but McCullough is still running slightly ahead of 2024 pace. The "decline" is really a reversion from an exceptional 2025.
| Contractor | Q1 2024 | Q1 2025 | Q1 2026 | Δ YoY |
|---|
| Stan's | 132 | 154 | 116 | -24.7% |
| McCullough | 92 | 120 | 95 | -20.8% |
| Radiant | 26 | 110 | 89 | -19.1% |
| Total market | 1,608 | 1,722 | 1,584 | -8.0% |
Monthly permit trend — 2023 to 2026 YTD
2023202420252026 YTD
Part two
What 3,162 customers are saying
Every Google review McCullough has received, analyzed for patterns the star rating can't show.
Google reviews
0
93.3% five-star
Rating
4.84
Highest among top 3
2025 volume
0
Up from 396 in 2023
Recent trend
4.77
Q1 2026 — down from 4.93
Review velocity — per quarter
Rating trend — per quarter
The system, not the people
Complaint themes across three layers — negative reviews, 4-star reviews with buried complaints, and 5-star reviews with warning language. 35% of 4-star reviews contain a "however" or "but" — 4.4x the rate in 5-star reviews. The pattern is remarkably consistent: the technicians get praised, the back office gets flagged.
Complaint themes — three-layer stack
1–2 star4-star warnings5-star warnings
Christopher D. (December 2025): "Leaving 4 rather than 5 stars to encompass the entire process. The HVAC tech, Kyle did a stellar job... However the in-office customer service team needs some support, I found them to be disengaged and disorganized." This is the "system, not people" finding written in the customer's own words.
Pricing complaints doubled — 20% of negatives in 2023, 40% in 2025–2026. Customers love the technician but are frustrated by the system. Of 4 recent 1-star reviews, McCullough responded to 3 — one remains unaddressed. A $15K install complaint with no response is sitting on the Google page.
The people are the moat
Top named employees. Every one above 4.90 stars. Zero with multiple negatives.
| # | Name | Mentions | Share | Avg ★ | Neg |
|---|
| 1 | Kyle | 121 | | 4.98 | 0 |
| 2 | Henry | 73 | | 4.99 | 0 |
| 3 | James | 70 | | 4.94 | 1 |
| 4 | Chris | 64 | | 4.95 | 0 |
| 5 | Mitchell | 60 | | 4.97 | 0 |
Strongest signal in the briefing. Every negative review targets the system — phones, scheduling, pricing. Zero target the technicians. Kyle alone appears in 4.1% of all reviews. The technicians are the moat. The back office is the leak.
Part three
Three findings the data raises
Each anchored in the evidence above. Each ends in a strategic question that only McCullough's leadership can answer.
1
South Austin is contested
What the data shows: 78745 flipped from McCullough-led to Radiant-led in one year — Radiant moved from 16 permits to 40 while McCullough held flat at 24. 78748 softened similarly; McCullough dropped from #1 to #3. Both zips are dense, aging, and within McCullough's historic service footprint. Radiant is not a random competitor — they're PE-backed, geographically focused, and moving through the South.
The question: Is the loss in South Austin a pricing issue, a marketing issue, a territory coverage issue, or a brand-awareness issue? Each diagnosis points to a different response. The data identifies the pressure — it does not diagnose the cause.
Evidence: permit data, zip-code cross-reference 2024–2025
2
48 years of installed base
What the data shows: McCullough has been installing systems in Austin since 1977. Residential HVAC systems last 12–15 years in Austin's climate. That means every McCullough install from 2010–2014 is now at or past end-of-life — a cohort measured in the thousands of homes. Public data can identify which of those addresses have filed a replacement permit since; the ones that haven't are sitting on end-of-life equipment today.
The question: Does the 48-year installed base represent a reactivation opportunity worth a structured outreach program, or a cohort that has already formed loyalty elsewhere? The answer depends on data McCullough owns internally (ServiceTitan) — but it can be pressure-tested against public permit records to see which former customers re-permitted with whom.
Evidence: 48-year operating history, Austin HVAC replacement cycle, public permit cross-reference
3
The technician-system gap
What the data shows: Named technicians average 4.90+ stars across the review corpus. Kyle alone appears in 121 reviews at 4.98 stars. Yet overall rating softened from 4.93 to 4.77 in the most recent quarter, and 35% of 4-star reviews contain buried complaints about phone handling, pricing communication, and scheduling — 4.4x the rate in 5-star reviews. Customers praise the technician by name, then critique the office around them.
The question: Is the back-office friction a training issue, a staffing issue, a software issue, or a structural one tied to scale? A 4.77 rating is still excellent by industry benchmarks — the question is whether the trend line matters, and whether the friction is contained or compounding.
Evidence: 3,162 Google reviews, sentiment analysis 2023–2026, 4-star warning keyword scan
Where we go from here
What we offer
This briefing is the first half. The second half is turning public data into something actionable.
A
The New Owner List
A monthly list of Austin homes that sold in the last 90 days, are 12+ years old, show no record of a recent HVAC replacement, sit above $400K in value, and fall inside McCullough's service zips — with existing customers excluded. Ranked by the signals McCullough values most: days since closing, home age, value, truck proximity, stronghold vs. contested zip. New owners are the highest-intent, lowest-loyalty buyers in the market. Built entirely from public data. You decide what to do with the list.
One-time build · Monthly refresh available · Exclusive to one Austin HVAC operator
B
The Monthly Watchdog
Everything in this briefing, refreshed every month. Competitive permit tracking by zip. Review velocity and sentiment shifts across the top 10 Austin HVAC operators. New entrant alerts. PE activity. A 30-minute sync to walk through what changed. The dashboard version of what every PE-backed competitor already has — but for the independent side.
Monthly retainer · 12-month exclusive · Austin residential HVAC
Permit data: City of Austin Open Data, dataset 3syk-w9eu. 2023–2026, issue-date-anchored. 491 contractors entity-normalized.
Reviews: 3,162 Google reviews via Outscraper, March 2026. Full-text sentiment analysis across three rating layers — 1–2 star, 4-star, and 5-star reviews with buried warning language.
Confidence and limits: Permit counts are verified against the source dataset. Review sentiment classification is algorithmic and carries an estimated 5–10% false-positive rate on warning-keyword scans. Revenue and EBITDA figures discussed separately are triangulated estimates, not verified financials. This is external market intelligence, not an audit.
Beyond this briefing: the review corpus also supports an annual narrative synthesis — what each year looked like in customers' own words, year-over-year. Available as a separate deliverable if useful.
What this cannot see: service revenue, maintenance agreements, headcount, financials, ServiceTitan data. Everything here is from outside the walls — the same view PE-backed competitors are using.